The present invention relates to increasing performance of Networked communications and in particular to seamlessly maintaining connection-oriented communication between end-terminal devices in an IP-based network.
The growth in data communication traffic, including email, client/server applications, multimedia applications, Internet and intranet applications, has continued with an increasing number of applications being implemented across the networks. Often provided with ample networking infrastructure, an increasing number of applications are being designed and implemented across the network. This is particularly true for enterprise applications. Thus, it is increasingly likely that a user's business applications will be established across a network.
Unfortunately, by incorporating a network into an application, the application users will be subject to the available network capacity, communications costs, and availability. If an interrupt should occur in the network, the application will effectively “break” leaving the user to reestablish the application and possibly have to deal with corrupted or even lost information. Such interrupts can result from hardware failures or even from increased network traffic.
The Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) reference model is a widely used model describing the flow of data traffic across a network. The OSI model has seven layers; each of the seven layers communicates with a layer below it through a specific interface and its peer layer on a different system in the network through a specific protocol. The combination of all networking protocol layers is often referred to as the networking stack. Packet based Transmission Control Protocol over Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) is perhaps the most widely known protocol in use in the Internet. IP is a network layer (Layer 3), packet-oriented protocol that defines a set of standards for addressing and routing of packets across a connectionless network. TCP is a connection oriented, transport layer (Layer 4) protocol that defines a way to ensure reliable transport of information.